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Quote note (#347)

The narrative that Russia — a country with an economy smaller than Italy — smaller than New York State’s — will take over the world is less compelling than than the alternative thesis: that the tide of chaos is rising across the planet. With the European Union weakening, the Middle East perceptibly falling apart and African and Latin America their same old selves the danger is less that some rival empire will conquer the world than that power vacuums will spread entropy all over the planet.

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Huntington wins again. Liberal democracy created instability, and now we reap that whirlwind. In the meantime, all of the dummies — who have been rewarded in the past for sticking to the Narrative — are doubling down on the order that has just failed. This makes it easy to know who to exile to Venezuela.

It is worth remembering that one of the strengths of liberal democracies is that they are insane. Contrary to public belief, this makes them very hard to fight against, and generally causes democracies of insufficient power to waste themselves rapidly, but renders great powers almost invincible. That is because all diplomacy, and especially that which is practiced by liberal democracies, assumes that countries will act rationally based on their own best interests. Democracies do not; but a large enough insane carnivore will end up with plenty of meat in its maw regardless, such is the function of the International Community, which MM rightly identified as predatory.

This form of insanity is anti-fragile, which is to say, as entities these insane governments tend to grow more insane, rabid and ferocious the harder things become for them. However, anti-fragility always comes with a cost; and in the case of democracy, (in which federal republics and all republics in general are just special cases of the general popular sovereignty type which I’m using ‘democracy’ to stand for here) there are two fragility points that it creates to acquire this temporary ferocity (such as was noted in the Jacobins in France, a very exaggerated version of that found in the disciples of Locke.)

1. There is no generally limiting factor which prevents the insane government from treating all people the same, including its own people, whose stability and prosperity grant the government its base of operations: the first is autophagy;

2. The external effects of democratic insanity on the world-at-large will be two-fold: entities that are immune to democracy’s particular insanity – i.e. they ignore the government and deal with the tentacles (such as Russia and a lot of Eastern Europe have been doing) and entities that are in fact anti-fragile with regard to the effects of democracy such as Al-Qaeda and ISIS (perhaps China): thus the second is immunization and counter-evolution.

It is very clear from the start that Locke’s ideas – not that they were totally new or unique, but their formulation and their context combined with their intent – were a mind-virus of a kind. He should be dug up and hung publicly, if that has not already been done to his corpse yet.

Military power is different from economic power. The Mongols lived on mare milk yet conquered the world. South Korea is starving and terrorizing Japan, the third economy of the world. Russia has a superb army and the will to use it.

What’s your stance on global warming? Moldbug and Jim tend to insist it’s a myth, quite fervently, and it’s all silence on your end. Once again, I have the urge to tell you that a podcast with Jim would be good for truth-seeking (and the acceleration that entails). The two chief inheritors of Moldbug never reflect on the other – what’s up with that? Idgas about the global warming debate myself but I’m sure when I bring this up your differences with Jim spring to mind. What’s the main one?

You might be surprised to find that our host is not an inheritor of Moldbug, but a different strain of thought that developed at around the same time, based on similar intuitions but coming to very different conclusions. Look at his post where he hangs his hat on Thomas Hobbes rather than Thomas Carlyle. Insistence on the importance of “early moldbug” over “late moldbug” indicates non-moldbuggian-ness pretty clearly.

So why does he call it the Cathedral and not Leviathan? Why did he call Moldbug’s patchwork essays “scripture” (on twitter)? Did Land come up with the crypto-puritan hypothesis? Formalism? Neocameralism? In regard to the JQ he delegates responsibility to Moldbug; Nazism (altright) as demotism: Moldbug. There are probably other things. Which of the abovementioned does Moldbug renig (heh) on in late-UR? That I associate the abovementioned with Moldbug demonstrates my point: that he is his chief inheritor, as he has, as it were, co-opted his brand.

A military might that can match the current hegemon, coupled with relative poverty? Perfect combo for sovereign entrepreneurship. Russia could tax-farm the shit out of Europe and Mediterranean, if they had the vision to grant liberty to their protectorates. A new invasion from the steppes is not out of the realm of possibilities. Allow private military corporations to occupy and rule Middle East, tax them. Let them show the world how easy it is to cultivate order when the “ruler” doesn’t actively self-sabotage.

This could be the greatest monetization of naked military power since the Roman Empire.

How big was England’s economy compared to India’s? Manchuria’s compared to China’s? How about the Arabian Peninsula’s compared to the Eastern Classical World’s? Or of course, the really big one: Mongolia’s economy compared to the rest of Eurasia’s?

It is conveniently ignored that the source of the chaos in the MENA, Central Asia and Eastern Europe is the US itself. Belarus is now being targeted for the Ukrainian treatment. If all goes according to the Deep State plans, we will get to see just how good the Russian military really is.

It describes several high level Russian military’s view on how color revolutions work. They really seem to have the deep state, soros, and the rest of the family resemblance groups nailed (know your enemy, and all that).

(Notice that the public western discussion of these russian discussions on color revs was turned inside out with claims that the russians were really describing their own new style of war, which is completely backwards to what was going. This really goes to show that public facing western military thinkers have no idea what they are doing, or are blatantly shilling for the deep state).